What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0

[Beltane70]

It’s very rare that I drop an anime, after I saw how absolutely bad the animation was, I dropped Ex-Arms without hesitation. The animation looked like the animators just learned how to use the software and this was their first attempt to use it. 

[Sanity is Optional]

This is a pretty solid season.

Kumo Desu Ga is my #1 so far, the VA for Kumoko is the always amazing Aoi Yuuki and she is doing justice to the MC's rants.

Then we have more of:

• Shingeki no Kyojin
• Yakusoku no Neverland
• Dr Stone
• Re:Zero
• Beastars

Plus some great looking originals

• Wonder Egg Priority
• Back Arrow

And then some adaptations that are looking solid

• Ura Sekai Picnic
• Kemono Jihen
• Horimiya
• Mushkou Tensei (if the MC's pervyness isn't too much of a turnoff)

Haven't watched SK∞ yet, but always willing to give a BONES show a shot.

 

[JB0]

44 minutes ago, Sanity is Optional said:

Kumo Desu Ga is my #1 so far, the VA for Kumoko is the always amazing Aoi Yuuki and she is doing justice to the MC's rants.

Kumoko is very well done. I really feel like they nailed the character.

Having read a good bit of the prior art on this one, I was looking forward to it. And with the benefit of foreknowledge, it is kinda amazing how bad those dudes that burned Kumoko's web screwed up. She woulda just stayed in the cave eatin' frogs and livin' the indolent shut-in life if they hadn't gone and poked the dragon spider. But they did, and thus we have a story.

 

But as I said elsewhere...
You are hereby formally notified that the anime adaptation of "I'm a Spider, So What?" has begun airing.
It is the best isekai anime, because it is "I'm a Spider, So What?".

[Keith]

I've seen Macross 7 at least 15 times over the years, and it's just as epic each and every time.

 

BOMBA!

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

This is my watch list from this season.

 

Azur Lane - Bisoku Zenshin!

Digimon Adventure (2020)

Go-toubun no Hanayome S2

Hataraku Saibou S2

Hataraku Saibou Black

Horimiya

Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun

Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?

Log Horizon S3

Mushoku Tensei

Re Zero Break Time Second Season

Re Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu S2 part 2

Shingeki no Kyojin

Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken S2

World Witches Hasshin Shimasu!

Yakusoku no Neverland S2

Yuru Camp S2

My favorites are Rezero, and Yuru Camp

[Sanity is Optional]

11 hours ago, JB0 said:

Kumoko is very well done. I really feel like they nailed the character.

Having read a good bit of the prior art on this one, I was looking forward to it. And with the benefit of foreknowledge, it is kinda amazing how bad those dudes that burned Kumoko's web screwed up. She woulda just stayed in the cave eatin' frogs and livin' the indolent shut-in life if they hadn't gone and poked the dragon spider. But they did, and thus we have a story.

 

But as I said elsewhere...
You are hereby formally notified that the anime adaptation of "I'm a Spider, So What?" has begun airing.
It is the best isekai anime, because it is "I'm a Spider, So What?".

I'll agree with you except for one thing.

Youjo Senki is the best isekai, Kumo Desu Ga is #2.

 

NAI WA~

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Wasteful Days of High School Girls is a good show.  It has been rather funny.

[chyll2]

someone here recommended world trigger before. I watched it despite the bad adaptation and read the manga.

 

fortunately, season 2 right now is really looking good.

 

most of you guys already pointed out, but this current listing that we have is so far the strongest that I can remember. There are promising adapatation, sequels, etc

[Podtastic]

On 1/11/2021 at 11:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

 dystopian young adult fiction to being the author's love letter to both far-right militant nationalism and violent antisemitism.

Is this a reference to a third series? 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Is this a reference to a third series? 

No, it's a reference to the plot development in Attack on Titan's last two story arcs.

Its author was already known to have some... questionable... views and sensibilities given who some of the characters are based on.  The story arcs that followed the time skip changed the setting considerably in a way that can only be described as "putting on the Reich".

 

Spoiler

After the defeat of the Beast Titan, the discovery of Grisha's note about the existence of a world outside the walls, the invention of a wall-mounted weapon that can kill mindless Titans with basically almost no risk, there's a flashback to Grisha Jaeger's childhood in the nation of Marley and a four year time skip to present-day Marley.

Let's cut straight to the point... Marley is the Attack on Titan setting's version of Nazi Germany.  Our heroes from the story thus far unknowingly belong to an ethnic group called the Eldians, who are for all intents and purposes the Jews, with all the unfortunate implications that come with that combination.

Marley is a fascist, expansionist power that - when the story resumes there - is revealed to be at war with much of the world.  The Eldians are an oppressed ethnic minority in the nation of Marley who have few or no rights, are forced to live in poverty in fenced-off ghettos, have to wear armbands identifying them as Eldian, and if they were lucky could be granted almost-equal rights by becoming Honorary Marleyans through service to the state.  

On its own, this wouldn't be ringing any alarm bells as long as Marley were the villains of the story.  After all, Zeon in Gundam was pretty overtly Nazi-ish too.

Where it starts to get worrying is that Marley and its people are not the villains... and the story leans heavily into the idea that Marley's treatment of the Eldians is well justified and potentially much too lenient.

There's a backstory dump where it's revealed (to the audience) that the Eldians are the real villains of the story.  Around two thousand years before the story's "present day", the primitive Eldians acquired the power of the Titans and used it to launch genocidal pogroms against their neighbors until they established a vast empire.  The Eldians and their empire oppressed the world for 1,700 years and were estimated to have killed three times the total modern population of the world until their empire fell into civil war and ultimately collapsed with one of their own nobles assisted Marley in an uprising.  Every Eldian who could fled to the island where the walls were created, and the rest of them were either wiped out or become prisoners in the lands they formerly ruled.  Marley, and possibly other nations, have had to contend with Eldian efforts to rebuild the Eldian Empire using the power of the Titans and go back to being the oppressors instead of the oppressed by infiltrating the Marleyan military and government while there was also an Eldian deep state (the Tybur family) secretly ruling Marley planning to deflect the world's hostility from Marley to the other Eldians on Paradise island via having assembled ambassadors from much of the world murdered in order to cause a world war against Paradise.

Now the heroes of the first part of the story are a new wave of Eldian nationalists who launched a preemptive strike on Marley that killed numerous civilians, overthrew their own government AGAIN in order to put the increasingly insane Eren in charge while he and the holder of the Beast Titan both pursue their own separate genocidal agendas: Eren to exterminate all non-Eldians, and Zeke to exterminate all Eldians, while the world is busy trying to exterminate them too.

Spoiler

Eren wins out in the end, and activates the wall titans to destroy the entire world outside of Paradise island.

It's all quite horrific... the world's bigotry against the Eldians is 100% validated as the vast majority of Eldians gleefully jump from one fascist military junta to the next in order to take revenge on the world with only a small handful bothering to stand up against Eren when he decides to destroy the rest of humanity via the wall titans.

 

Edited January 19, 2021 by Seto Kaiba

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I finally finished Koyomimonogatari and I love the return of Hachikuji.

[Keith]

7 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I finally finished Koyomimonogatari and I love the return of Hachikuji.

It's a little darker, but I'd recommend checking out Katanagatari if you can find a copy. It's a much shorter Nissi Oissin story, but very awesome.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

16 hours ago, Keith said:

It's a little darker, but I'd recommend checking out Katanagatari if you can find a copy. It's a much shorter Nissi Oissin story, but very awesome.

I might, but it is not related to the Monogatari series is it.

[Keith]

7 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I might, but it is not related to the Monogatari series is it.

No, but it has the same writer, director & studio.

[Podtastic]

On 1/19/2021 at 9:36 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Around two thousand years before the story's "present day", the primitive Eldians acquired the power of the Titans and used it to launch genocidal pogroms against their neighbors until they established a vast empire.  The Eldians and their empire oppressed the world for 1,700 years and were estimated to have killed three times the total modern population of the world

Sounds terrible. But unless they also killed tens of millions of their own people in forced labour camps after obliterating their individual/ property rights, they still haven't reached @#communist level yet.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Sounds terrible. But unless they also killed tens of millions of their own people in forced labour camps after obliterating their individual/ property rights, they still haven't reached @#communist level yet.

Pretty sure the Eldian Empire in Attack on Titan makes the worst human rights of the Soviet Union look like a goddamn garden party by comparison.

 

Spoiler

Based on the memories of the original founding titan holder, Ymir Fritz, the Eldians started out as a bloodthirsty barbarian tribe that engaged in slavery and mutilated its slaves physically as a matter of course... and went downhill from there.  Once Ymir obtained the Founding Titan, their repertoire expanded to mass genocide via titan and forcing their own people into cannibalism in their desperation to pass on titan powers after Ymir died.  If the Tybur family's account based on the memories obtained from their own titan is accurate, the Eldian Empire killed three times more people than the entire global population at the time of the show's final season.  (If the world population there is around the population of Earth c. the World Wars the way the rest of the setting appears to be comparable to, we're talking between six and seven BILLION dead.)

Then, of course, the Eldian deep state that secretly controls Marley has also been using titans in warfare against its neighbors for generations... adding to that death toll.  They also orchestrated turning Eldians who advocated for restoring the Eldian Empire into titans and used them to turn the last refuge of the Eldian Empire on Paradise island into a gulag with mindless titans as jailers.  Then there's millions more in casualties when the Marleyan titans break into the walls at the start of the series.

Basically, Marley is as close as it gets to being the "good guys" in the story despite being Nazis in everything but name because the Eldians are Complete Monsters with more of a death toll to their name than most fictional antagonists can claim outside of sci-fi.

 

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

and on a lighter note..

ReZero S2 Part 2,  3 episodes in and its still doing quite well.      I was worried that the 2nd season would kinda fall flat, but so far so good.    I need to catch up on the Novels,  but I still need to finish Goblin Slayer,  and Suka Suka first.

 

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

16 hours ago, Keith said:

No, but it has the same writer, director & studio.

I am definitely going to watch it.

1 hour ago, Stampeed Valkyrie said:

and on a lighter note..

ReZero S2 Part 2,  3 episodes in and its still doing quite well.      I was worried that the 2nd season would kinda fall flat, but so far so good.    I need to catch up on the Novels,  but I still need to finish Goblin Slayer,  and Suka Suka first.

 

 

This season of Rezero has been nothing but great.  I think it makes far more sense after reading the books.

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

I was told to check out Horimiya,  and it's pretty good so far upto Ep 3.

 

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

23 hours ago, Stampeed Valkyrie said:

I was told to check out Horimiya,  and it's pretty good so far upto Ep 3.

 

 

I agree I have enjoyed it too.

[Gerli]

Attack on Titan is getting better every damn chapter.... 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I finished Owarimonogatari season 2 and it was so good.  The situations in this show are ridiculous.

[Tking22]

So I'm really enjoying Attack on Titan's final season, but my question is, and I've searched but not really found definitive answers, will the anime have an original ending? I read up to the "Jeagerists" storyline in the manga, which I believe the anime is just about getting to, the manga is ending in April, and this is the final season of the anime, was there a Game of Thrones situation where the showrunners got with the manga creator and got filled in on the ending? Or will there be two endings? One anime and one manga? 

Also, last weekend I finally watched the live action Attack on Titan movies and wow, they were like, really terrible. I thought the Full Metal Alchemist movie had a really, really, hard to get past cast, but Attack on Titan was far more egregious. Also, why make those movies so soon? The original story, setting and ending were terrible. The Japanese, like, just sort of, somehow created a virus, or mutagen or something, that makes random people into titans? No Levi? What an awful couple of films, with the only saving grace being the actual titan action, which looked pretty good, and was pretty intense. The ODM gear stuff looked terrible, which I expected. 

[bluemax151]

On 1/12/2021 at 10:44 PM, Podtastic said:

I mostly agree with this, except that when I watched I thought some of the animation was actually good in few scenes. 

I haven't watched the Blu Ray versions just the original DVD release so I'm not sure if that makes a difference.  I think the major issue was that it was compared to Plus a lot because they came out around the same time. Not really fair though since M7 is a TV series.

 

I've been reading Arifureta but hadn't watched the Anime adaptation until now. It's actually pretty good. I'm slightly torn on the art style because in some instances I find its better but in others its worse. Not a major detractor in any way.  It's nice to have a ML who is not a push over.

Also started rewatching You're Under Arrest since I picked up the DVDs during one of Rightstuf's sales. Looking back I think I actually enjoyed the Live Action better. The only thing it was really missing was Aoi.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I am watching Zoku Owarimonogatari and this show is just absurd all the time and it is just great.

[hachi]

On 1/20/2021 at 3:36 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

No, it's a reference to the plot development in Attack on Titan's last two story arcs.

Its author was already known to have some... questionable... views and sensibilities given who some of the characters are based on.  The story arcs that followed the time skip changed the setting considerably in a way that can only be described as "putting on the Reich".

 

  Hide contents

After the defeat of the Beast Titan, the discovery of Grisha's note about the existence of a world outside the walls, the invention of a wall-mounted weapon that can kill mindless Titans with basically almost no risk, there's a flashback to Grisha Jaeger's childhood in the nation of Marley and a four year time skip to present-day Marley.

Let's cut straight to the point... Marley is the Attack on Titan setting's version of Nazi Germany.  Our heroes from the story thus far unknowingly belong to an ethnic group called the Eldians, who are for all intents and purposes the Jews, with all the unfortunate implications that come with that combination.

Marley is a fascist, expansionist power that - when the story resumes there - is revealed to be at war with much of the world.  The Eldians are an oppressed ethnic minority in the nation of Marley who have few or no rights, are forced to live in poverty in fenced-off ghettos, have to wear armbands identifying them as Eldian, and if they were lucky could be granted almost-equal rights by becoming Honorary Marleyans through service to the state.  

On its own, this wouldn't be ringing any alarm bells as long as Marley were the villains of the story.  After all, Zeon in Gundam was pretty overtly Nazi-ish too.

Where it starts to get worrying is that Marley and its people are not the villains... and the story leans heavily into the idea that Marley's treatment of the Eldians is well justified and potentially much too lenient.

There's a backstory dump where it's revealed (to the audience) that the Eldians are the real villains of the story.  Around two thousand years before the story's "present day", the primitive Eldians acquired the power of the Titans and used it to launch genocidal pogroms against their neighbors until they established a vast empire.  The Eldians and their empire oppressed the world for 1,700 years and were estimated to have killed three times the total modern population of the world until their empire fell into civil war and ultimately collapsed with one of their own nobles assisted Marley in an uprising.  Every Eldian who could fled to the island where the walls were created, and the rest of them were either wiped out or become prisoners in the lands they formerly ruled.  Marley, and possibly other nations, have had to contend with Eldian efforts to rebuild the Eldian Empire using the power of the Titans and go back to being the oppressors instead of the oppressed by infiltrating the Marleyan military and government while there was also an Eldian deep state (the Tybur family) secretly ruling Marley planning to deflect the world's hostility from Marley to the other Eldians on Paradise island via having assembled ambassadors from much of the world murdered in order to cause a world war against Paradise.

Now the heroes of the first part of the story are a new wave of Eldian nationalists who launched a preemptive strike on Marley that killed numerous civilians, overthrew their own government AGAIN in order to put the increasingly insane Eren in charge while he and the holder of the Beast Titan both pursue their own separate genocidal agendas: Eren to exterminate all non-Eldians, and Zeke to exterminate all Eldians, while the world is busy trying to exterminate them too.

  Hide contents

Eren wins out in the end, and activates the wall titans to destroy the entire world outside of Paradise island.

It's all quite horrific... the world's bigotry against the Eldians is 100% validated as the vast majority of Eldians gleefully jump from one fascist military junta to the next in order to take revenge on the world with only a small handful bothering to stand up against Eren when he decides to destroy the rest of humanity via the wall titans.

 

lol that's...quite something. Fortunately I hadn't bought into the hype of this show, I would have been pissed at that backstory.

[Macrossnalds Worker]

Heavy Metal L-Gaim. Just started the Mark 2 LD box. Funny that the Mark 2 opening starts at the end of the Mark 1 box tho..

It definitely doesn't feel like a Tomino show, I guess it "feels" like whatever a Nagano show feels like. The death toll is way too low for Tomino. Maybe that will change? The animation standard is getting better and more consistent as the story continues. Wish I could get subs to OVA III which is included on the last disc of the Mark 1 box which I'll watch after I complete the series. Apparently OVA I and II are just recaps anyway but wouldn't mind having the short bonus animation in those. Oh and Amu is awesome. I like Kyao too, always losing and getting paid out but he stays positive. 

Aside from that finished watching Bubblegum Crisis box, had never seen the second half of the series. I think it kind of peters out into mundane low key stories compared to the first 4 episodes. I'm sure that's not how it was originally planned, I think I read that somewhere too. 

Anyway the best thing about the BGC red box is that it has Hurricane Live and Holiday in Bali on a separate disc. Saving those for when I can crack a few beers again (quitting drinking for the next 3 months, just to prove I can, gone 2 weeks so far)

[Gerli]

Last episode of Attack on Titan was Amazing... and sad.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I started Katanagatari and it is good and different. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Started watching some of this season's other offerings after getting caught up on Attack on Titan and Jujutsu Kaisen.

Honestly, the way they're handled now in Attack on Titan's final season, the titans come off more as Evangelion-esque mecha rather than the anthropomorphic eldritch abominations they were before the timeskip.  Eren's repeated emergences from the Attack Titan's body in mid-fight to talk to people, complete with hydraulic-sounding steam noises and the head slumping forward really just makes it look and sound like he's disembarking from one of Full Metal Panic!'s arm slaves.  It makes them so much less interesting and intimidating that the titan fights no longer have any real weight to them... especially now that Eren can spam-summon his own titan half a dozen times or so in a single fight.

Armor Shop for Ladies & Gentlemen deserves special mention as one of the shortest anime series I've ever encountered.  The individual episodes are not quite four minutes long, and that includes the credits.  It's an adaptation of a 4koma series, and it can best be described as a kind of horrid abomination-against-nature cross between Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san and Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time.  An unemployed guy named Kautz discovers an armorer's shop that exclusively sells fetish-y chainmail bikini-type armor (the owner's preference... or should we say fetish?) and discovers it's basically bankrupt and, out of exasperation, accidentally volunteers to do their accounting because the owner's a moron who runs the shop at a loss in order in order to perv on the few female customers they get and his beautiful female assistant is too dim to see the problem there.

It doesn't bring anything to the table except PG-13 fanservice under a looser interpretation of the word "armor" than Tomb Raider's usage of the word "tomb" and a feeling that the production group's families probably ask them when they're going to get a real job at every opportunity.

Edited February 5, 2021 by Seto Kaiba

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Kumo desu ga, Nani ka is hilarious Yuuki Aoi is great as the lead.

[Seto Kaiba]

Giving The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter a whirl.

So far?  Not impressed.  When it comes to fantasy anime these days, I'm starting to feel like even "generic fantasy" - a term which ought to be oxymoronic - doesn't begin to cover the lack of original thought.  This is "Form Letter Fantasy", where you just fill in the blanks with proper nouns and everything's the f*cking same.

In this case, I'm getting BAD vibes eerily reminiscent of Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight both in terms of the painfully dull premise and the increasingly skeevy emphasis on both fanservice and the protagonist's powers being fueled by jamming his tongue in the nearest girl's mouth.  After all of about 11 minutes, it's also heading towards isekai protagonist w/ overwhelming power territory too in a worrying fanservice-friendly way.  The new skills our boring fantasy protagonist acquires are fueled by "Life Points", which are replenished BY HEDONISM.  

I have a feeling I might not make it to the end of the episode before quitting in disgust.

[anime52k8]

So thanks to some online gaming friends I'm finally watching current anime again.

right now we're group watching So I'm a Spider, So What?; Wonder Egg Priority; and The Quintessential Quintuplets. Having a great time with all 3.

:edit:

oh yeah, we also watched the Konosuba movie which was really great.

 

Edited February 7, 2021 by anime52k8

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

17 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Giving The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter a whirl.

So far?  Not impressed.  When it comes to fantasy anime these days, I'm starting to feel like even "generic fantasy" - a term which ought to be oxymoronic - doesn't begin to cover the lack of original thought.  This is "Form Letter Fantasy", where you just fill in the blanks with proper nouns and everything's the f*cking same.

In this case, I'm getting BAD vibes eerily reminiscent of Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight both in terms of the painfully dull premise and the increasingly skeevy emphasis on both fanservice and the protagonist's powers being fueled by jamming his tongue in the nearest girl's mouth.  After all of about 11 minutes, it's also heading towards isekai protagonist w/ overwhelming power territory too in a worrying fanservice-friendly way.  The new skills our boring fantasy protagonist acquires are fueled by "Life Points", which are replenished BY HEDONISM.  

I have a feeling I might not make it to the end of the episode before quitting in disgust.

I am watching this too and It is pretty bad. Somehow I manage to watch every week.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I am watching this too and It is pretty bad. Somehow I manage to watch every week.

Giving the first episode a second try... I gave up in disgust around 15 minutes in on my first attempt.

The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter is the kind of anime that people who find anime distasteful think all anime is like... a bunch of skeevy PG-13 fanservice wrapped in a paper thin excuse plot.

Sometimes, it really sucks to be a completionist.  I hate quitting a series before the end but this one is on course to join the list of shows I gave up on because my disgust outweighed my desire to see things through to the end.